Phenomenology & Practice (Journal)
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Vital Powers: Cultivating a Critter Community
No full textThis paper is based on the eco-pedagogical aspiration to live with domesticated animals in accordance with Alphonso Lingis\u27s Community of those who have nothing in common. I draw uponthis remarkable text as well as Lingis\u27s animal writings in describing moments and movements of pathic community. Such a community in affective affiliation with one another, where symbiotic relations are possible and bodily kinships are exercised, exemplifies what is possible in more rational human communities where domesticating impulses seek to harness the vital powers of coconstitutive life. Of telling significance are predatory threats, the manner in which they appear, and the protectionist responses they occasion. By recasting these threats and responses in terms ofmotional affordances, it may well be possible to move with non-human creatures, both literally and figuratively, beyond the anthropocentric confines of domestication. Animals with whom weappear to have nothing specifically, or in species terms, in common can show us how to cultivate more pathic communities of our own kind
Acting Slow in a Fast World: A Phenomenological Study of Caring in the Recovery Room
No full textIn this paper, we discuss “the slow in the fast” related to care situations in a “fast-track” hospitalsetting were the length of patients’ stay has been reduced significantly. The discussion is basedon a narrative created from observations made in a postoperative care unit where patients areintensively observed and cared for during a very short time span.We found that within the phenomenological notions of lived time, lived space and livedillness, it is possible to create an imaginative space in time – to make a time warp. Despitebeing in a setting where the objective time measure dominates, the nurse can create a rhythmof her own in the room. Thus, acting slow in the quick meeting means that nurse-patientrelationship is characterized by calmness and quietness, the nurse’s engagement in the patient’ssuffering and her help to the patient to endure the present and hold the now
Trading in Imaginaries: Locating Authenticity in Argentine Tango
No full textArgentine tango tends to be associated with highly gendered images of women and men locked in contorted embraces. These images constitute a tango imaginary that is removed from the lived experience of the dance. Remaining close to the experiential core of tango, this paper provides a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenological account that re-imagines tango as a mode of being-in-the-world. By situating us in direct and constant relationship with an attentive partner and furnishing a complex grammar of constraints, tango generates a frame for creating and sustaining worldhood. By examining the how of dance, the kind of experience it offers up, we approach the dynamic emergence of Being. In what follows, I draw on my years of dancing tango to elaborate an understanding of the experiential dimensions of the dance, and how these relate to the development of shared focal practices that disclose insights associated with embodied being-in-the-world
The Feeling of Seeing: Factical Life in Salsa Dance
No full textSalsa dancing, a partnered dance premised on the felt sense of connection, is well suited to an exploration of Henry’s radical phenomenology of immanence and Heidegger’s facticity of life. Birthed in social celebratory contexts, salsa carries a particular motile freedom. What matters most is not how the dance movements are created from an outer frame of reference, but the experience of interactive responsiveness that emerges from unanticipated acts of giving life to another. Connecting to one’s partner and exuding a presence filled with life is revealed in an indepth interview with two-time world champion salsa dancer, judge, choreographer and coach, Anya Katsevman. This interview attempts to invoke the kinetic, kinesthetic and affective registers of the lividness and livingness of salsa dancing. As a phenomenological inquiry into factical life, the inter-view is presented not so much as a matter of shared perspectives or viewpoints, but more in the way of an inter-feeling, a practice of life engagement. This affectively-oriented approach provides both promise and challenge to the field of phenomenology. It invites us to delve more deeply into feeling acts of seeing. It also helps us understand how, through attending more fully to acts of seeing, we can increase the intensity with which we feel the upsurge of life
The Purse: Carrying Around My Private World
No full textThe purse is an object so ordinary and everyday that it is unlikely to have elicited much thought or reflection. Nevertheless, its capacity to extend the domestic into the foreign and provide a private space in public mark it as unique. In this paper, inspired by Heidegger’s jug, I examine the particularities of the purse and reflect on its unique meanings as a carrier of a private world
Transforming Body, Emerging Utterance: Technique Acquisition at a Puppet Theater
No full textThis paper describes the moment when a new body technique is acquired, using a case study in which three puppeteers manipulate a single puppet together. Although phenomenology assumes that the world is always “already there” before reflection begins, we can still ask how a sequence of movements is acquired. Struggling to learn puppet choreography in a training session, the learner’s body encounters difficulties because it cannot easily imitate the proper movements. At the same time, the puppet master cannot easily explain those movements because he or she is so familiar with them. The communication between instructor and learner requires a kind of reflection that helps the learner transform and attain competency; this reflection is different from a dualistic disembodied form of thinking thatuses abstract representation. The focus is on the precise coordination of gestures and onomatopoeic utterances that emerge through improvisation in the learner’s trial movements. It is not just “a process of thinking,” but an experience that evokes “a synchronizing change of my own existence, a transformation of my being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 213), through which the puppeteer facilitates his or her own body’s comprehension of new movements. Using puppetry as an example not only illuminates the phenomenon of learning a bodily skill, but also reveals the dynamics of our bodies, which can enliven our conversation, engender our transformation, and realize our being-in-the-world
The Yoga Mat
No full textAfter centuries of yoga practice without any specialized surface, the yoga mat now seems to have become a nearly indispensable part of the practice. This phenomenology explores the intimations, the intimacy, and the space of the yoga mat in its everyday usage. It seems that the mat convenes a sacred space not only for the practice of yoga but of the practice of yoga
In Praise of Phenomenology
No full textA critical assessment of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenology highlights singular differences between Husserl’s phenomenological methodology and existential analysis, between epistemology and ontology, and between essential and individualistic perspectives. When we duly follow the rigorous phenomenological methodology described by Husserl, we are confronted with the challenge of making the familiar strange and with the challenge of languaging experience. In making the familiar strange, we do not immediately have words to describe what is present, but must let the experience of the strange resonate for some time, and even then, must return to it many times over to pinpoint its aspects, character, or quality in descriptively exacting ways. Moreover as Husserl points out, language can seduce us into thinking we know when we do not know. The methodology thus highlights the import of being true to the truths of experience, and in doing so, authenticates the basic value of a phenomenological methodology to the human sciences
Beyond Human Subjectivity and Back to the Things Themselves: Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter
No full textA review of Bennett. J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press
Mirror, Mirror
No full textLike with so many other everyday things that become extensions of ourselves, we experience the mirror—in that look and see moment—routinely and habitually. With unfaltering precision the mirror captures my face, immediately copying it back for me to examine. We owe, in part, our visual perceptions of self to the mirror’s convenient and ready-at-hand presence. Yet, is there not more to the mirror than relentless reflection? Looking to poetic, mythical and experiential accounts of the mirror reveal how it can surprise, jolt, distort, fool, engulf or otherwise interpolate us. In this way, our encounters with the mirror seem to manifest variously and differentially. It is at once there and not there, tangible and intangible, solid and transparent, and truthful and deceitful